


The Fall of '50

by candyriot



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:08:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24865816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candyriot/pseuds/candyriot
Summary: He remembers the fall of ’50, when Harry had his sights set on the rank of double-yefreitor...
Relationships: Harry Du Bois/Jean Vicquemare
Comments: 11
Kudos: 31





	The Fall of '50

**Author's Note:**

> art by [coolant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolant/pseuds/coolant) ([twitter](https://twitter.com/coolant6969))

He remembers the fall of ’50, when Harry had his sights set on the rank of double-yefreitor. The hectic schedule he and Jean kept blinded Jean to the slow motion collapse he was playing witness and accomplice to until too late to shore things up.

Harry had a projector for playing reel to reel video, then, before he pawned everything he owned. Old technology, but watching video on a blank wall was better than nothing. It had cost Harry something when he bought it, years ago. He had wanted to keep his bourgeoisie woman happy. Maybe it helped, for a while. The point being, Jean didn’t own a projector, which meant Harry’s apartment was always an appealing refuge.

As recently as that fall, the one-bedroom apartment on Perdition had a couple too many roaches but it hadn’t doubled as a dump yard for empty alcohol bottles and cigarette packages. The stains hadn’t set into the carpet. Maybe the mold had started encroaching without Harry paying attention to battling it back, but the mildew smell didn’t ring any warning bells.

They had Friday off. For Harry, that meant serious drinking. They’d put in hard hours at the station, and a volunteer police department didn’t get paid overtime, but when he invited Jean back to his with the promise he’d picked up a new video, Jean joined him. However the film turned out, watching it would be better than a night in his own apartment, alone, paying for his own beers.

So, he watched one of Harry’s devastatingly depressing intellectual dramas. An entroponetic scientist became obsessed with discovering a prime number large enough to impose order on the pale, turning his home into a madhouse full of radiocomputers, while at the same time he slowly discovered his contacts with the outside world were only memories from out of the pale and he had already been driven completely insane.

“Why the fuck do I let you make me watch these?” Jean asked not Harry but his fourth bottle of lager right before he put the rest of it away. He’d stripped off his uniform coat and lost his belt and tie to slouch on the couch in his undershirt and trousers.

“Next time, it’s your pick,” Harry said, twice as drunk as Jean and grinning despite the fact the protagonist had just drilled a hole into his own head to try and exorcise the pale before the screen skidded black.

Jean wrinkled his nose and leaned forward to set his empty bottle on the coffee table with its three companions of his and several more of Harry’s empty beers. A lot of beer for 6.8%, but Jean lied to himself that they’d been pacing themselves. Easy to do, drunk. He fixed his partner with a fierce, if slightly glassy, look.

“What the fuck _was_ that? Brain puree running down his face.”

Harry dragged his leg up and turned toward him on the couch. Jean realized with horror that he hadn’t expected there to be an answer to that question. He didn’t really want to focus on the guy drilling a drain in his skull. Harry started sharing enthusiastically, anyway, with accompanying gesticulations:

“S’ trepanation. People used to think you could vent a bad brain by opening a hole in your head. Archeologists say people even survived it. There’s skulls with these healed holes they found in Mesque and they—“

“I need another goddamn beer,” Jean interjected, but its swift production from the six pack on the end table pacified him and he let Harry continue as he cracked it and took a cold sip.

His partner kept rolling, uncannily articulate for the enormous amount of alcohol he’d consumed.

“—these archeologists think it was a response to pale exposure. Because of the way the pale gets _inside_ you. These ancient Mesques thought they could let it out. Like steam.”

Jean allowed himself to entertain these facts without sarcasm for a quiet moment.

“And they kept doing it to people?”

“For hundreds of years.”

“Mkm. Maybe it works.”

From the way Harry’s glazed eyes lit up, Jean should have let his intellectual curiosity lie. Harry could vomit decreasingly coherent entroponetic theory until he passed out. 

“You’re not the first person to wonder that. I read about a doctor in Graad trying to get permission to try trepanning lost causes—”

Time to cut him off. That drunk and anything would cause his brain to jump tracks. Jean emphatically thrust his beer at Harry with a mockingly cruel grin:

“You should volunteer! Anyone who spends their time reading about this sick shit and watching fucking snuff films has something wrong in their head.”

Glancing away at the white square of light on the wall, Jean retreated back into a more serious demeanor.

If he reflected on the film it had actually kept him invested until the end, one mind bending twist after another. The uneasy feeling it left him with didn’t stem from the film being _bad_ , it stemmed from...

He saw Harry had fallen silent, suddenly too fascinated with his brown bottled lager. Not as if Jean had offended him, but as if some thought had caught in the wild spiderwebs of his brain and caused him to shift into low gear.

This shit. This shit was what had Jean worried. The disquieting introspection on top of an uptick in alcohol consumption.

“Hey,” he prompted, lifting his foot to give Harry a little kick.

He frowned when he failed to get a response. He gave Harry a second little kick.

“Harry. Shitkid. I’m talking to you.”

Harry looked up, looked over at him, his focus swimming before it resolved on Jean.

“Sorry.”

He had no idea what to do with Harry’s apology. Apologies were coming more often, too. He knew Harry had had a rough patch, before. So rough his former partner had transferred to D-Wing. The eventual fallout of Harry’s former fiancée, Dora Ingerlund, leaving for Mirova.

But things had been going well between him and Harry for over two years. He’d never worked harder, but he’d never had a better partner. Nauseatingly large reserves of trivia aside, he liked Harry’s smarts like he liked Harry’s sharp intuition. Ten years older than Jean, Harry still had stamina to spare, and a ridiculous tolerance for pain that kept him on task in tight situations. And who had Jean ever spent this much time with off the clock? Jean admitted Harry could carry him away when the man got wrapped up in dogged pursuit of a case, but they were a great match. Everything about them except Jean’s inability to bridge this unsettling gap revealing itself with mounting frequency.

“Sorry for what? What are you always sorry for?”

Harry rubbed at his forehead.

“I’m sorry.”

Jean frowned. That wasn’t good enough. Either apologizing for apologizing wasn’t good enough, or Jean himself wasn’t a good enough interrogator because he failed to get anything besides another apology. The alcohol blurred the details.

“God damn it,” Jean muttered, taking a pull from his beer.

Setting down the beer, he reached over to Harry’s side of the coffee table and palmed the man’s Astras. Thumbing out a cigarette he hung it between his lips and, grabbing the lighter, inhaled until it caught.

Not a smoker, himself — he’d only shared a smoke with co-workers enough times not to make an idiot of himself lighting a cigarette— he passed the lit fag to Harry, whose attention immediately latched onto the tar filled stimulant.

It satisfied him to see Harry relax. He’d read the situation right

He sat with his elbows on his knees, chin resting on one fist, watching Harry sidelong as his partner relaxed back into the couch to smoke.

Harry’s eyes drifted shut, smoke curling from his mouth as he exhaled imperceptibly slow, the white miasma twisting and spiraling past his flushed cheeks and ruby nose toward the ceiling.

A weight massed in Jean’s chest. He recognized Harry as impossibly distant. A world away. The better they got to know each other, the more he’d slowly been let in on just how alien the strange space Harry occupied really was.

He had an angry urge to go after the ugly, psychedelic tie knotted around Harry’s throat, as if the thing realistically stood between him and making his partner see reason and connect with reality. That had to be the beer thinking because the last thing Jean needed to do was feed into Harry’s delusions by acknowledging the tie’s agency.

Not that the tie _had_ agency.

Fuck all.

Impossibly distant, maybe, but Harry couldn’t be much closer – his right leg less than an arm’s reach away. Jean bit his lower lip, weighing the urge to reach ouch, his depression creeping suffocating up through him. The idea took him at unexpected junctures, a temptation to be battled off. Could he bridge that gap with an appeal to their undeniably mutual physical reality?

Would it even matter, and how much did he have left to lose?

Long odds that, even if Jean completely blew it, Harry would care. He’d seen his partner flirting with men. He’d seen Harry flirt with _him_ , harmless stuff, checking him out with a wink when he stripped off his wet uniform jacket leaving an equally wet white dress shirt clinging translucent to his body after getting caught in a summer downpour.

He moved closer on the couch, nothing subtle about it. The frame creaked under their combined weight. Not like Harry noticed, drunk and in another world with that cigarette and the voices he sometimes mentioned at intervals, only in private.

Sitting close, Jean reached across with his far arm for better leverage and let his hand slide over Harry’s knee, stroking it with his thumb through those offensive orange pants. That wasn’t bad. It had Harry exhaling contentedly and leaving the cigarette hovering a minute while Jean’s thumb plied him.

Jean paused. It wasn’t until Jean paused that Harry took another drag, assuring Jean they were now in _adjacent_ mental realities. A thrill of electricity vaporized a few pounds from the poisonous weight of the sorrow inside him.

He pushed his hand up Harry’s thigh, kneading, while watching the flinches of Harry’s brow and twitches of his closed eyelids. This recent alcohol-soaked Harry lived with a thin sheen of grease and sweat on his skin, but Jean’s body didn’t hate the way it made those little details leap out in the mellow light of the projector. Being able to stroke and sink his fingers wider and grasp reminded him again his partner had never lost the grit and sinew of the natural athleticism that had drawn him to physical education in another lifetime when he’d been someone Jean never met.

A shallow gasp. Harry shifted his thighs further open, smoking only slowly. A long column of ash broke off, scattering over his left leg and the couch. Heat swelled in Jean’s cock. What had started as a lonely, desperate thought exercise took on visceral dimensions. Aggression bled through his depression. He wanted more leverage, more contact, and his mouth on Harry’s body – all of it more fiercely than he wanted his last girlfriend, but a lot of factors were colliding.

He’d lost his girlfriend while constantly cleaning up for this goddamn drunk as his professional life blurred with his personal life into a single ugly smudge.

Harry’s rough, deep voice, all cigarette tar doused with high gravity beer, finally spoke up, laconic:

“Where’s this going?”

Jean muttered _fuck_ beneath his breath, his hand high up Harry’s thigh, now, and running low on options.

“Am I a homo-sexual? Isn’t this more your forte than mine?”

  
  


Harry’s alcohol-glazed eyes blinked open. They flickered over Jean, a heat behind that gaze that had his stomach in knots. Then, Harry looked away to drop the cigarette into an empty beer bottle, the ember fizzing out in the leavings at the bottom.

Harry had collected his focus. His gaze returned to Jean sharper, calculating, now.

“It would have been. A long time ago.”

That wasn’t it. Harry thought on his feet too fast when things got physical not to have come up with options. He had Jean on the spot and Jean could see Harry unspooling him behind his too-perceptive gaze.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he swore, accusing and forbidding, expression twisting into a scowl.

Refusing to be vivisected, he shoved the arm between them up the back of the couch to snake out and grasp Harry by the back of his head. He dragged him in, lips against lips, as he shoved his roaming hand into Harry’s crotch, ungracefully but gainfully.

Now he had his partner bearing down on him, both of them kissing sloppy, more passion than precision, Harry’s thick moustache as plush under his lips as Harry’s five o’clock shadow was sharp and rough. He had a handful of cock, too, and no inclination to be particular about it, grasping Harry rough through his fly, groping the contours of him while Harry, drunk as he was, got at least half hard – tough to tell from the way the fabric bunched. Jean had seen him take a piss a few times and in his briefs a few others and knew the man had heft, but not so much Jean couldn’t imagine getting him out of his pants.

He wanted to get him out of his pants a lot more than he would’ve expected on the account of the groans he was wringing out of him, groans that vibrated between them to caress Jean’s throat. Women didn’t groan like that, baritone in a way that went straight through him. Women didn’t have beefy hands like the ones getting hold of him now, either. He would have liked it less if it had him feeling vulnerable, Harry could be a physically intimidating, even violent man, but Jean could bench about Harry’s weight and the amount of roughing up Harry could do felt promising – about right.

It was a cacophony of emotions inside Jean, none of them the near-constant, familiar fatigue. The thrill of it coursed electric under his skin, the most life he’d felt in his body in years. Harry was big and hot around him, a furnace of a man. What he would’ve called the stench of him an hour ago, that alcoholic sweat, had him reeling in the best damn way, a musk that was seeping into him, erasing barriers.

It was Harry. After everything Jean’s suffered to try and keep the man functioning at capacity the fact of taking real pleasure in each other sent him reeling. Their kisses had firmed up, hungrier and deeper, wet and easy. Harry was really firming up, too, and Jean had started to sort out exactly how to grasp and knead at him to get the sounds he wanted. Jean’s own cock rested thick and comfortable in his briefs. Sure, he’d like to get it out sooner or later, but the newness hadn’t worn off Harry pawing him with his big hands, rough palms and fingers dragging over his undershirt and bare skin. Jean gasped, air hissing in through his teeth as Harry’s hand slid past his waist to grab a handful of his ass through his uniform pants, dragging him up for a rough squeeze.

It was warm and physical and right, and Jean gave himself over to it as something like joy suffused his chest, an effervescent high-wire emotion. He wanted more of it, stroking Harry’s mutton chops and groping his dick like he was milking it out of him.

Dangerous, a black part of him chimed in. All of this was dangerous.

Maybe Jean just couldn’t let himself enjoy something, anymore, except he knew too much about Harry Du Bois, reckless and relentlessly manipulative in high gear, to imagine giving himself over to him physically on top of emotionally might be a good idea. He already struggled to keep his head straight dealing with him.

He crushed those interrupting thoughts with every gram of aggression in him, obliterated them at the same time he changed tact, artlessly repositioning himself to get his hands on Harry’s shirt, up underneath the tie, and start getting it off him button by button. The idea of the furry bastard bare armed and bare chested caused something in Jean to twist in apprehension, except he was swimming in the smell of him and vague implications of Harry’s whole weight on top of him and those massive biceps flexing swiftly started to sound like good ideas.

“Take off the tie,” he growled, as he started exposing Harry’s chest, his hatred for the thing unmasked in his words. If the tie argued, Harry ignored it. Harry did just that with satisfying immediacy and tossed the hideous thing onto the coffee table.

That gave Jean hope, just enough. He hadn’t gotten through to Harry through years of emotional insistence, but he matched the man in the physical arena. His body spoke louder than shouting his head off. It made Harry actually pay attention.

His drunken fingers fumbled with a button and Harry brushed them out of the way, taking over, those fingers always surprisingly nimble for the size of them.

Jean didn’t care. It let him get his undershirt off, strip it over his head and throw it who-knew-where, his alcohol-heated skin breathing free.

Yeah. Yeah, Harry had one hell of a body. That shirt peeling off those broad shoulders did something to Jean, stole his breath. He hadn’t shown up prepared for any of this. Fuck, all he knew about homo-sexual sex was people like Torson cracking jokes about f****ts taking it up the ass. Jean figured that world and Jean’s were sure as fuck not getting that intimate, tonight – the point was there were a lot of _potentials_ suspended in all this and Jean didn’t know exactly how to navigate them.

There was a kind of existential unfairness that those shoulders kept a few inches on Jean’s despite Harry working out irregularly. Some men just put on muscle like that and others had to stick to a regimen and a three thousand calorie diet.

All of that stopped mattering as they roughly renegotiated themselves on the couch and Jean really did let Harry get up on top of him on account that Harry knew what the fuck they were doing and Jean had initiated this driving blind. Drunk as he was, some things were passing by in fragments but he knew he’d been _pulling_ Harry somewhere in this and now he was under him, both of them with one leg hanging off the couch, which had Jean’s legs wide open, his cock rigid with the thrill.

He ran his hands up Harry’s chest, through the fur of him and back down. He liked that, alright, dark and dense and damp with sweat. He thumbed a nipple, softer skin with extra give even puckered up like it was. Harry had plush tits compared to Jean’s, rock hard, but Jean could feel the muscle under the upholstery. He’d seen Harry haul grown men up off their feet and smash a gangster’s face in. It gave him a rush to be exploring that heavy-pelted territory with Harry’s arms flexing at the pleasure of his touch.

Harry bore down on him, mouth on mouth, again, their chests pressed tight, now, Jean’s hands still exploring, sometimes only fingertips and others nails combing through wiry hair, biting skin. Jean had a plunging wet tongue stroking slick against his, a mouth sucking at his lips, and a great weight covering him, both muscle and heft. He could push his hands down Harry’s body and grope handfuls of him. If it should have put him off, it didn’t. He liked when Harry moved on him, their bodies dragging together.

He wanted more of the friction between the fly of his uniform trousers and of Harry’s idiotic disco pants. He could feel Harry’s cock on his and he couldn’t, depending on the stiff creases in the fabric.

Maybe Harry read it or tasted it off him. Harry slid down him, ducked his own hips and rolled up hard against Jean, hard up between his legs. He could feel Harry’s dick riding up his despite the rough, uneven fabrics.

Heat drowned his whole face, maybe his shoulders, too, in a blush as that ecstatic hot contact wrung a whimper out of him needier than he imagined his body could make.

Harry laughed and kissed him slow, closed mouth. That dizzy joy broke out in him, again, and Jean started to wonder what he’d bought into. He let the thought be swept away by the changing tide, this lingering kiss tender in a way he hadn’t expected from Harry, as rough and intense and as loud as he was. 

If Jean had spent years steering Harry away from the quiet introspection that turned his partner morbid, he invited that quiet, now, this gentle emotion being poured out on him with no spectre of the past casting a black shadow across it.

Something in his body changed, intensifying in sharp contrast to the soft touch of the thumb stroking his pocked shoulder. If Harry had told him right then that he’d be putting it up inside him, Jean would’ve agreed to it. Harry between his legs felt so fucking good. All the crude, lewd implications fell away like shed scales. They were gentle together, now, and it made Jean want something hard and immediate but no less intimate. Except he didn’t know how to ask. He would’ve needed Harry to take it.

…but his partner asked for nothing from him, just kissed him with building intensity and let their hands keep moving on each other. Now Harry had started exploring Jean again, himself, the ridges and valleys of his cut muscles. He pushed his big thumb into Jean’s belly button and pressed down. It stoked a nerve that shot a bolt of heat straight to Jean’s cock. Jean made another of those unmanned sounds. Hadn’t even known his body could be manipulated like that.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Harry rumbled.

“Like fuck I have. Like I’ve ever been with a man,” Jean groused, sentimentality still tangled up with nebulous frustration. Then: “Don’t touch me like that. It’s too much.”

He trusted Harry to intuit he meant right there where he’d touched him right then. The man seemed to have gotten the message, pulling his hand away, then pushing it up Jean’s side to find new territory. Harry got him groaning by tweaking at his nipple, and Jean’s cock answered that with heat, too, but Jean liked it better.

It felt like awhile that the two of them lay there, touching and exploring, mouths moving from kissing to bites and suckling, intensity ramping to a steady pressure. When Harry licked his way up Jean’s neck while his big hand stroked and caressed his muscled abdomen it was the best fucking thing to happen to Jean in a while.

Harry climbed off him it was hard to say how much later and reached for another beer, cracking it and putting it back.

Jean spent a minute blinking unfocused at the ceiling and letting the sensations he’d been through play back in his body before he got up, too. He grimaced as he leaned forward with his erection trapped in his pants to grab his unfinished beer off the coffee table. He thumbed the button of his fly open while he made short work of it.

His eyes latched onto Harry and his bare upper body like he’d never seen him before, tongue moving slowly across his own lips, tasting the tobacco from him. His own body couldn’t tell him everything it wanted, but he stayed with the knowledge that Harry could give it to him, sweat and flush and paunch and that hair on him, big arms and all.

Harry got up. Jean got up with him. He felt stupid but too drunk to care that he did stepping up to his partner and kissing him, swaying intoxicated there together in Harry’s shitty living room.

Harry grabbed another handful of ass – of course he did. Jean scoffed against his mouth but it put another thrill in him. He kissed him deeper. He felt good. Too good. He felt great. He felt hot, desired and careless. Nothing to stop him from playing grab ass with Harry, either, and if that ass wasn’t as firm it still got a groan from the man, the kind of thing that it had already become clear was the most important.

Jean lost his pants on the way to the bedroom, palming himself through his briefs, stoking the fire in his stomach as he focused through the distance of alcohol and really started to think about getting off.

Harry stopped at the side of the unmade bed and, first throwing the rumpled covers back, shed his own trousers. Jean stepped up to him with hungry curiosity and Harry, eyes glittering with amusement, indulged him. He dug his cock out of his briefs, stroking it, fat dick disappearing in and out of a meaty hand.

It held Jean’s fascination like a magic trick. For starters, he was drunk as shit, but that’s where half the magic came from. He struggled to wrap his head around the fact all that dick was for him and he could have it any way he wanted. He knew he wanted to see Harry cumming – not just because they were drunk and horny but because he wanted to _cause_ that orgasm. He’d never had a thought close to that in his life. Other men’s semen was something collected cold from crime scenes, not something hot and living he wanted on his skin.

When Jean had to grab onto Harry’s shoulder to steady himself, Harry laughed, again. They’d been down so long Jean only wanted more of that sound.

Shaking his head, his partner shed his briefs, erect cock fully exposed. He shrugged Jean off and climbed into the bed, rolling over onto his back. Jean got caught staring again until Harry nodded for Jean to drop his briefs and Jean came back to himself and complied, pushing them off, cock springing free.

The surreality resolved into carnal immediacy. Jean negotiated his way into Harry’s bed, finding himself wrested by the waist to roll them over onto their sides as soon as he had straddled Harry. Their legs tangled up, Harry’s hand dropped to wrap itself around Jean’s cock. Jean breathed in heavily as Harry started to stroke him. They stretched out in a way that brought them closer. Jean slid his hand under Harry’s head and dragged the older man in to kiss.

His hips moved in spasms as Harry masturbated him with a practiced hand. Everything else moved slow and swimming.

A drunken swoon and it was over.

Specifically, any possibility of getting off together had been removed from the table.

Harry had passed out.

Jean groaned in frustration. He even gave him a shake, for all the good it did.

No, when he started counting up the beers Harry had put away through his own haze of alcohol and arousal the fact Harry _couldn’t_ be woken up made itself clear. Even if Jean got him awake, he had strong doubts Harry would remember what they’d been doing.

He was furious.

With Harry. More so, with himself.

What had he thought he was doing, sticking his hand in Harry’s crotch like a horny teenager? Where did the idea come from that with every week bringing a new disaster getting intimate and naked would bring around a working solution? How fucking unprofessional was it to fuck around with your partner?

Who let himself love a sweaty, half out of shape, stinking, alcoholic, selfish, completely insane walking disaster like Harry Du Bois?

Jean had been asking himself that last question in one form or another for months, now.

_Why do I put up with this? Why do I cover for him? Why do I let him get away with drinking like he’s started drinking? Where do I draw the line in taking on his work when he’s working himself to death? Why am I helping him get this promotion when it’s killing him? Will things go back to normal if we make this happen or are they going to get worse?_

What did either of them think would happen if Harry got promoted to double-yefreitor? They’d each be making 250 reál more a year. An honorary increase for an honorary rank and—

Jean loved him.

Harry looked so fucking peaceful sleeping in front of him with his hand still loosely wrapped around Jean’s dick that Jean wanted to shove him over onto his back, except then he’d be left to worry about him suffocating in his own vomit.

“You won’t even fucking remember this,” he accused the slumbering drunk.

He couldn’t know for sure, but he had a good idea about it. He’d chosen to feel Harry up when Harry was getting blackout drunk and he’d been too drunk, himself, to make the connection.

Jean loved him, but he hadn’t been in love with him. Now things had gotten dangerously close – no, had crossed a line he’d have to reel back from.

For all that he saw Harry as kind, charismatic, dependable when it was life or death, a friend he cherished, someone he worried over who was worth making sacrifices for… for all that, he didn’t spend time mooning over him. Wondering what he was doing, sometimes, maybe, but not thinking about him in the starved way his mind was churning over him, now.

He reached down to move Harry’s lax hand off his cock, but felt his own hand closing around it, instead, just for one more minute of that hot touch he knew with grim certainty he wouldn’t be feeling again.

When his stomach turned from the impulse to rut into Harry’s hand he gently unwrapped the man’s fingers from him and dragged his arm up to let it lie between them.

His eyes couldn’t stop looking all the wrong places, from the way Harry’s softened nipples peeked a brownish-pink from amid the pelt of his chest hair to the dark line of hair running down his belly to his half-flaccid cock, still eye-catchingly thick, the slit of it drooling precum.

He tried to focus on Harry’s sleeping face. He made a point to himself that the alcohol was making the rosacea worse and it was also _destroying his liver_ , but his thoughts were beer-slippery and kept sliding back to Harry’s lips and how it had felt when their mustaches brushed together.

He became aware of the coolness of the air on his exposed, naked body. Making a face, he made the effort to drag the covers up over them. He prioritized Harry’s warmth because he didn’t have any intention of falling asleep in the wreckage of his own catastrophic failure of judgement.

He could. He wanted to. God, he wanted to wake up and let Harry work out what happened. In that reality, less shitty than Jean’s real life, Harry would kiss him, then. Fuck, maybe he’d say something stupid, too, like he’d been wanting Jean a long time, like in the kind of sappy movie Harry never watched because all his favorite films were about devastating existential torment. He’d stop obsessing over his one hundred times long gone smokeshow bourgeoise fiancée, too, and they’d fuck.

Jean wanted it bad enough to hate himself and it almost got through to his dick but the drink still had everything slipping and sliding inside him. He still had a hard on, just from lying there in Harry’s body heat.

He reached down between his thighs, taking a hold of his own dick. It wasn’t anything special, but it weighed about right, had enough girth to keep his girlfriends happy, and it deserved to get off after this whole exploration into homo-sexual territory. His dick was the only one sticking to the script.

He could dimly see his drunk thoughts for what they were. Self-justifications. 

Retrospectively he’d think how he shouldn’t have finished that last beer.

It felt good to be wrapped up in the heat of his own hand and give himself a tug. He couldn’t be deeper in the smell of Harry, coming off his sleeping body and stale from the bed. He soaked in it bone deep. Not deep enough. 

He knew, he _knew_ he wanted Harry inside him and couldn’t face the fact of never-going-to-happen so he just moved his hand until he got a rhythm going and the pain started to ghost away.

He didn’t need a fantasy, letting the memories of the evening play back, disjointed, mind moving from one sensation to another. Harry kissing him soft— not that one, that one stung. But Harry thrusting up on him. Yeah, yeah he could’ve taken some more of that. Harry licking up his neck, yeah, with his shoulder still stinging from where the older man sank his teeth in.

Jean left a wet mess on the bed between them and lay panting in the wake of his orgasm, clinging tenaciously to consciousness. 

Later he’d curse himself for acting like some perverted fuck when Harry was right there, passed out. But it wasn’t half because it was exactly Harry lying beside him that allowed him to cling to that illusion of intimacy a few minutes longer than was smart. Drunk or not, he’d already been disabused of his fantasies.

Finding his clothes, getting dressed, and turning off the projector left him at the doorway in the dark mentally collecting himself to make the phone on the corner and find a taxi.

He had to project a lot of confidence and sobriety he didn’t feel to be walking down Perdition at 1 AM drunk in an RCM uniform, even if he was the one with the gun.

 **Especially** because he didn’t want to be assaulted for his gun.

He turned the lock on the doorknob behind him as he let himself out. Harry being too drunk to bolt the door wasn’t exactly a stretch.

The city stank like piss and gasoline. Jean had his hands full keeping his head up and walking straight and he appreciated it kept him from brooding. Not falling asleep in the cab was another engaging challenge.

No, it wasn’t until he woke up in his own bed in a rumpled uniform that stank like sweat and alcohol with a hangover the size of a lorry and an acute sense of his own failure that the pain of it knifed under his skin like a splinter of glass, there to stay.

He broke out in a cold sweat at his desk at the station, the day after, waiting for Harry to show up like waiting for his execution. 

He shouldn’t have worried. Harry waking up naked after jizzing on the sheets was, what? Completely and totally unremarkable. The guy genuinely remembered nothing, just asked Jean if Jean was coming down with something, concern Jean blew off.

He stopped drinking with Harry. Was going dry, he said. Felt like he needed to clear his head.

He really needed to, too, and in the worst way.

That part was harder. Catching glimpses of Harry’s body — certain angles, a little extra skin — and not feeling his dick jump was almost impossible to think his way into.

It took a couple of months, but Harry’s sudden and brutal decline helped the novelty wear off.

There weren’t any more movie nights. Harry sold the projector to get drunk.


End file.
